The necessity for CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and one-to-one marketing has recently received a great deal of attention due to factors such as shortening of the product life as varieties of products are produced, and customer's orientation to customized services as the use of the Internet spreads. These methods try to raise the customer satisfaction, win new customers, and keep customers.
One-to-one marketing is a kind of database marketing which creates a database of individual attribute information including the age, gender, hobby, preference, and purchase log of a customer, analyzes the contents of the database, and makes a proposal complying with customer's needs. A typical method of this marketing is variable printing. These days, a variable printing system which customizes document contents for each customer and outputs the document has been developed along with the development of the DTP (Desk Top Publishing) technique and the pervasion of digital printing apparatuses. For example, the template of a customized document for variable printing can be created by a form creation application as disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-222493.
Generally, when such a customized document is to be created by the variable printing system, containers are laid out in a document. The container is a drawing area for drawing contents (drawing contents (e.g., an image and text)), and is also called a field area.
In a conventional variable printing system, the size of a container associated with a text or image serving as contents is fixed. When contents in the database are inserted (flowed) into a container and the data amount is larger than the container size, the following problems arise. That is, if the data is a text, overlapping of the text occurs. If the data is an image, clipping of the image by the container occurs. When the data amount is smaller than the container size, no proper display may be obtained such that a gap appears between the container and its internal contents.
In order to solve these problems, there is proposed an automatic layout system. The automatic layout system can flexibly set the container size of a container laid out in a document. Software which implements the automatic layout system can change the container size in accordance with, e.g., the data amount to be inserted.
A desired customized document can be created by, for example, laying out such containers in a document and associating a database with the layout (associating various contents in the database with the containers). The contents of the document can be changed (made variable) by properly switching contents in a container in the customized document (changing the association). Such a document is called a variable data document, and a printing system using a variable data document is a variable printing system.
There is also proposed a technique of, when a text to be inserted into a container of a fixed container size exceeds the container size, changing (in this case, reducing) the font size of the text and displaying all the text within the container.
In an environment where the container size is flexible, when a container becomes large depending on contents to be inserted, the container overlaps another container in the same document. In an environment where the font size is flexible, the font size becomes excessively small when the data amount of text to be inserted is very large.
The system which automatically calculates the position and size of each container in accordance with the amount and size of contents is effective for preventing overflow of contents and reducing the free space area. However, a layout not intended by the creator may be determined, and it is difficult to completely automatically determine the layout.
Hence, the final layout of a document whose layout dynamically changes in accordance with contents such as a text or image must be confirmed before printing. When each record targets a document made up of a plurality of pages, and the document contains both a page of a dynamically changed layout and a page of a fixed layout, it is expected that the document is finally confirmed mainly about a page whose layout has dynamically been changed.
However, variable printing generally prints many records (e.g., 10,000 records). If the number of records of variable data which form a document is very large, it is very difficult to manually find out a page whose layout has dynamically been changed or a record of a large layout change amount from an original template.